[EM] Poll, preliminary ballots

[Richard, the VoteFair guy]

On 4/19/2024 1:15 AM, Chris Benham wrote:

 > ... It is not garbage like STAR.
 > ...
 > ... STAR is a horrible method that is very highly
 > vulnerable to both Compromise and Pushover.

Horrible, yes.  Garbage, no, because it's a clever way to improve 
single-winner score voting.  It's useful among friends when voting is 
not anonymous.  Or when "dishonest" exaggeration cannot be hidden.

 > If there are "failure types" in need of names, what's stopping you from
 > giving them names? ...

Time and money.  Unlike two STAR promoters, the folks at FairVote, and 
academic professors, I'm not getting paid to promote or advance 
election-method reform.

 >>   Approval voting requires tactical voting.  There's no way to avoid it.
 > The strategic burden on the voter is certainly no greater than with
 > FPP.  ...

Our goal is to rise way above plurality.  Accepting limitations of 
plurality is unnecessary.

Why impose any strategic burden on the voter?

 >> Another difference from IRV is about what FairVote calls "overvotes."
 >> RCIPE counts them correctly.  ...
 > I think it is reasonable to treat ballots that (against the ballot
 > rules) equal-rank above bottom as though they truncated at that point.
 > Doing otherwise (as I think you advocate) without a quite complex
 > procedure I suggest makes the method a bit more vulnerable to Push-over
 > strategy.

I and most voters want to be able to rank an evil candidate -- Gollum, 
Voldemoron, etc. -- below all other candidates.  Truncation means the 
evil candidate is as acceptable as other "bad" candidates.

I've written code that correctly counts so-called "overvotes."  It's not 
a "complex procedure":

https://github.com/cpsolver/VoteFair-ranking-cpp/blob/master/rcipe_stv.cpp

 >> Avoiding any failures in REAL elections is what I'm "buying" by
 >> advocating RCIPE instead of IRV.
 > I'm still baffled as to why, if you don't like Condorcet failures, you
 > don't simply advocate a Condorcet method. How is the argument "Let's
 > lose strict compliance with several criteria met by IRV so that we can
 > somewhat more often elect the Condorcet winner" better than
 > "Let's lose strict compliance with several criteria met by IRV so that
 > we can ALWAYS elect the Condorcet winner"??

I'm bothered by the failures in Burlington and Alaska.  But those were 
not just Condorcet failures.  They also were IIA failures, 
center-squeeze failures, etc.

I want fewer failures in real elections.  I don't care about convoluted 
scenarios that would never occur in a real election.

Again, thank you for this useful discussion.  I appreciate that you 
really want to understand why I rank some methods better than others.

Richard Fobes
The VoteFair guy



On 4/19/2024 1:15 AM, Chris Benham wrote:
> Richard,
> 
>> I regard HOW OFTEN failures occur to be much more important than a
>> checkbox that says "yes" or "no" failures of this kind NEVER occur.
> Given that voting methods are mostly simple and cut-and-dried and so 
> plenty of 100% guarantees that criterion failures NEVER occur are 
> available, I find the approach "Near enough is good enough! I am an 
> expert. I've done a computer simulation" to be suspicious and flaky. 
> That attitude can lead to people switching off their brains and 
> swallowing BS propaganda from say STAR advocates.
> 
>> It's easy to overlook the many failures that do not fit within NAMED
>> failure types.  Those unnamed kinds of failures are being ignored
> 
> If there are "failure types" in need of names, what's stopping you from 
> giving them names?  Several of the voting methods criteria I uphold and 
> promote are ones I coined myself.
> 
>> Avoiding any failures in REAL elections is what I'm "buying" by
>> advocating RCIPE instead of IRV.
> I'm still baffled as to why, if you don't like Condorcet failures, you 
> don't simply advocate a Condorcet method. How is the argument "Let's 
> lose strict compliance with several criteria met by IRV so that we can 
> somewhat more often elect the Condorcet winner" better than
> "Let's lose strict compliance with several criteria met by IRV so that 
> we can ALWAYS elect the Condorcet winner"??
> 
>> Another difference from IRV is about what FairVote calls "overvotes."
>> RCIPE counts them correctly.  That could become a huge deal in the
>> upcoming Portland election for mayor -- where two or more marks in the
>> same "choice" column will be ignored as if those marks were not on the
>> ballot.
> I think it is reasonable to treat ballots that (against the ballot 
> rules) equal-rank above bottom as though they truncated at that point. 
> Doing otherwise (as I think you advocate) without a quite complex 
> procedure I suggest makes the method a bit more vulnerable to Push-over 
> strategy.
> 
>> I recognize that IRV's flaw is that the candidate with the fewest
>> transferred votes is not always the least popular -- as demonstrated in
>> Burlington and Alaska.
> IRV (properly implemented, with unrestricted strict ranking from the 
> top) doesn't have any "flaws". It simply fails some criteria that some 
> people like so that it can meet other criteria that some people like. As 
> Woodall put it, it has a "maximal set of properties".
> It is not garbage like STAR.
> 
>>   Approval voting requires tactical voting.  There's no way to avoid it.
> The strategic burden on the voter is certainly no greater than with 
> FPP.  With FPP the best strategy is to vote for your favourite among the 
> candidates you think have a realistic chance of winning. With Approval 
> you just do the same thing and then also approve every candidate you 
> like as much or better. An alternative is the simple "surprise" 
> strategy: approve any given candidate X if you would be pleasantly 
> surprised if X won or unpleasantly surprised if X lost.
> 
> It's a huge "bang-for-buck" improvement on FPP.  But I'm not a big fan 
> either.
> 
>> * STAR ballots are a dead-end ballot type.  (Always six columns, even
>> when there are three or four candidates.  And always with the star icon,
>> no thanks!)
> 
> I find this objection to be  superficial and just about style.  A lot of 
> ok methods can be happily used with 6-slot ratings ballots, such as say 
> ABCDEF grading ballots. STAR is a horrible method that is very highly 
> vulnerable to both Compromise and Pushover.
> 
> I welcome any comments you may have have about my poll favourite, 
> Approval Sorted Margins.  Or anything else related to my most recent ballot.
> 
> Chris